Opinion by Kip Hansen
Over the years there has been a lot of discussion about the power of numbers both to inform us and misinform us regarding the world around us.
In fact, some versions of the definition of science include the idea that all science is based on measurement – on numbers. This idea is wrong from the start and extremely unfortunate. Science – the effort to understand the physical world around us – must start with ideas – not numbers. Ideas are strung together into hypotheses and those hypotheses are tested first against existing knowledge through the application of logic and critical thinking.
Of course, many ideas can be confirmed or rejected based on measurements. However, measurements (and here I specifically mean measurements turned into numbers) in today’s world are often misrepresented, misconstrued and miscommunicated. With the advent of digital computers and their associated software, calculation and statistical analysis are far too easy and seem to have replaced both logic and critical thinking, even basic reasoning. Those data sets of numbers are an almost irresistible temptation to many of our colleagues in the various fields of science – they just can’t restrain themselves – they must dive in with Mathematica and other tools of digital analysis, making new sets of numbers and new visual representations of those numbers. They seldom stop there – they must add their opinions into the data set visualizations as various trend lines and others ideas that are not part of the data set at all.
In science today, data sets (or here) are often confused with the real world. We must acknowledge that data sets are nothing but a collections of numbers, hopefully carefully collected, labelled, accurate, precise and they hopefully represent information about some real attribute/s of some object or phenomenon of interest.
This is not always the case. For instance the data set(s) known as Global Mean Sea Level do not refer to the actual surface height of the global seas or its mean value but rather to a concept of what that height would be under non-existing conditions, such as “if the ocean basins had not expanded” and “if water storage on land had not increased”, as this quote illustrates: “Eustatic (global) sea level refers to the sea level change of the volume of Earth’s oceans. This is not a physical level but instead represents the sea level if all of the water in the oceans were contained in a single basin.” [ my emphasis – kh source ]
Regular readers of this blog or any other source of science news and science discussion, including the leading journals of science, are well aware of the problem. Because some data set exists –> some scientist/s dig in with statistical analysis of some portion of the data set in an attempt to find a publishable result –> they always find such a result. The fact that the result found is not significant in the real world (for instance, not a Minimal Clinically Important Difference), that the result is trivial, that the result is vanishing small with error-bars that all include zero, that the result is ephemeral, that the result adds nothing to our accumulated knowledge base, that the result depends on the pre-existing bias of the researcher or his field of research, that the result has no applicable reality or that the result is true only in a very limited academic-sort of way – all these are ignored and under-emphasized in the resulting journal paper. The journal paper is then churned into click-bait by the Science Mass Media and presented as newly discovered truth.
Again, I know that there is a lot of good science being done, and some of it does result from careful considered analyses of good data sets about a topic of interest. But there is far too much of the other as in the previous paragraph.
So, all that said, let’s look at a recent example and see what one might gain by looking at a data set from a new perspective which allows us to throw out the numbers and by doing so, arrive at a more pragmatic understanding of it all.
Some clever people in the UK have realized that lots of old archival records exist about the tides in UK harbours and that these records might lengthen the data sets of Mean Sea Level (MSL) in those places for those time periods. It is an interesting topic – made all the rage by the alarming warnings about Sea Level Rise being issued by all sorts of advocacy groups and misguided scientists for the last 30 years. I wrote a brief report here on historic EU tide gauge data back in 2019. [ I also found an older UK record, albeit on temperature at Greenwich Observatory and thought it important enough to post here a few years ago. ]
The resulting paper, an interim report of an ongoing project, appeared recently as “Changes in mean sea level around Great Britain over the past 200 years” by P. Hogarth, D.T. Pugh, C.W. Hughes, S.D.P. Williams in the journal Progress in Oceanography. The paper self-describes in the abstract as:
“We systematically assimilate a wide range of historical sea level data from around the coast of Great Britain, much of it previously unpublished, into a single comprehensive framework. We show that this greatly increased dataset allows the construction of a robust and extended Mean Sea Level curve for Great Britain covering a period of more than two centuries, and confirms that the 19th century trend was much weaker than that in the 20th century and beyond.”
In plain language, what they have done is transcribe old tide journals – recordings of high and low tides, their magnitudes and timings – from various places around Great Britain mostly from the early 1800s, applied a bunch of analyses and averaging and such, then patched that data onto the modern averages of MSL for Great Britain from the Permanent Service for Mean Sea Level (PSMSL). All-in-all a good and valuable effort.
Here’s an example of the type of old records from which data has been extracted.
(Correction: While modern tide measurements in the UK are in meters, the above, due to the date, may have been in feet, Current tidal range is Wick, Scotland is 1.5 to 2 meters which would compare favorably with the above being 5 feet. Many sites in the UK do have modern tidal ranges of 3-7 meters. h/t reader “Old England”)
Their main result is this chart:
Our own Willis Eschenbach re-graphs and throws stats at the data set from this study in an interesting piece here at WUWT. Note that the full data set is available only by viewing the original journal article here and scrolling down to the heading for Appendix A. Just under that heading is a Download All supplemental files link (which somehow cannot be copied, you have to go to the page and click on it. It downloads a .zip file).
In this essay I will evaluate this data set using only the mind – meaning critical thinking, prior knowledge, and logic – and not math, leading up to throwing out the numbers – the individual measurements (in this case these are averaged averages of averages…).
Things to know about this data set before looking at anything about this paper – especially the numbers:
- While the data set is claimed to be an “extended Mean Sea Level curve”. It is not that, but rather a graph of the annual average of annual average Relative Mean Sea Levels from 174 different sites on Great Britain (GB) and Ireland – some of the data points are modern (20th and 21st century) data and some are historic (19th century).
- The recorded numbers have been taken from and by instruments of various types that have been used over the last 200 years. Older data recorded by hand from tide staffs:
More modern records, mostly from the Permanent Service for Mean Sea Level (PSMSL), result from increasingly more accurate float devices in stilling wells. The most recent are probably “Air Acoustic sensors in protective wells”.
While the chart from the paper shows “error bars” they are error bars for the averages – and not anything like original measurement error/uncertainty. Tide staff readings, marked in half-meter increments, probably have an original measurement error of at least 2/10th of a meter (20 cm as in +/- 10 cm), even +/- 20 cm. The most modern, up-to-date, precise acoustic tide gauge has a per-the-technical- specs error range of +/- 2 cm.
- A brief survey of tidal ranges for harbours in GB reveals that a rough average of tidal range (high tide to low tide) is around 5 meters or 16 feet. Some can be 7 meters and more.
In the real world, this looks like this:
One of the historic record sites used in the paper under discussion is a few miles from Port Isaac. Port Isaac is the filming location for the famous Doc Martin TV series.
- Most of the data (there are a few exceptions) before 1920 depend on an average of less than 5 data points – compared to data from 1960 onward which is based on of 30 to 40 data points. Thus, uncertainty increases from two sources as we move back in time: original measurement error alone increases by at least factor of ten and sample number reduces by a factor of ten, again multiplying uncertainty.
- None of the tide data has been corrected in any way for Vertical Land Movement of the tide gauges themselves. This means we can only use the data for judging Local Relative Sea Level as we can not separate vertical movement (up and down) of the Land from the rise or fall of the Sea. Results are thus not applicable to Global Sea Level or its mean.
I am going to show the process by which one might use a philosophical or strictly mental approach — rather than mathematics or statistics — and applying prior knowledge, critical thinking and logic in the place of math or statistics — to evaluate the data set using the points above to gain perspective and reducing the provided chart to ONLY the things that it can really tell us reliably.
I do this in the following slide show of eleven simple images:
I hope the slide show came off as self-explanatory – but I’ve misjudged readers before. So, I’ll give my justifications slide by slide here below:
Slide 1: As given in the original paper.
Slide 2: I add (and later remove) a reminder of scale, for U.S. readers. The 300 mm of rise is about 12 inches.
Slide 3: I remove the unnecessary and misleading Red Line Trend. The paper’s authors ignore the factors of sparse data before 1920 and ignore their own data, by not including the data points before 1830 – instead drawing a trend line that seems to depend on a single outlying data point around 1817 (the first open blue circle on the graph) and seems to disregard the other early data points that are in line with the 20th century data. The Red Line is – to me and maybe you – viewpoint biased – trend lines drawn on graphs are always opinions – not part of the data. All of us are capable of looking at the graph without it.
Slide 4: I have added – as a grey underlay – something closer to the real minimum uncertainty in the tide measurements themselves. I keep it as small as possible – only +/- 10 cm on the left and the NOAA-spec’d +/- 2 cm for the most modern data. It is my opinion that the uncertainty is far greater, especially before the 1950s. ALL of the data points fall within the band of uncertainty thus we can ignore all those little squiggles – the little ups and downs – only the overall slope of the more reliable gray band, inside which we are pretty sure the real values lay, can be depended upon.
Slide 5 & 6: Trigger Warning #1 and #2.
Slide 7 & 8: I remove the numerical data points leaving only the more reliable data range seen as the grey area. The data range fades on the left side (earlier in time) as the data becomes more and more sparse and less and less dependable. I say in Slide 8, “almost correct view” because, like almost all programmatically created graphs, the scale is automatically set – without rhyme or reason – to about 120% of the graphed data range.
Slide 9 & 10: Here the vertical scale of the graph is corrected to be approximately the average Tidal Range — the average range of Relative Sea Level – for GB harbours. This is about 5 meters or 16 feet. This allows us to see the relative importance of the change in RMSL against our daily experience in the real world where this change takes place. (See the photos of Port Isaac in the body of the essay above.)
Slide 11: The final result of using Knowledge, Critical Thinking and Logic to derive the reliable pragmatic finding of the paper: “Changes in mean sea level around Great Britain over the past 200 years”. The original findings are not nothing . . . but they are not what was claimed, which was “…that the 19th century trend was much weaker than that in the 20th century and beyond.”
By Throwing Out the Numbers, and evaluating the data first as information, comparing it to existing knowledge, critically considering each aspect, applying simple logic and proper perspective, we can arrive at a more pragmatic understanding of the whole.
Bottom Line:
Hogarth et al., using the addition of historical tide records to modern records, have extended the understanding of long-term (two-century scale) Relative Sea Levels for GB’s harbours showing that average RMSL in those harbours has been rising steadily and more-or-less evenly since the early 1800s resulting in an overall 200-year rise of about 12-16 inches. In many locations in the UK this is a trivial amount when compared to their normal daily tidal range.
This result is far easier to see when we Throw Out the Numbers.
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Author’s Comment:
Many readers here may disagree with my approach above. Truthfully, I have just written out the sequential mental steps that I commonly use, when sitting in my easy chair, to gain a pragmatic perspective on the many data sets and graphs of those data sets that come my way in my daily walk through the ongoing outpouring of scientific results that I see in the journals and the popular science press.
I think it is a grand idea to capture all those tide readings from the old records and that the recovered data will be very valuable. In this case, when looked at with a pragmatic eye, it confirms that — contrary to the published finding — nothing unusual has happened with relative sea levels in the UK over the last two hundred years and nothing unusual is happening now. A good scientific confirmation.
It is a mistake to reify the data – to pretend that all those over-precise numbers and their little wiggles and squiggles are the thing itself: in this case, actual changes in mean relative height of the sea surface at the millimetric scale. In the reification, they have fooled themselves into calculating accelerations (speeding ups and slowing downs) and “trends” that just don’t exist in the real world.
The combined overall result, once we have thrown out the numbers, is perfectly sound and probably reliable.
Address your comments to “Kip…” if speaking to me. In general, when replying to or addressing a specific person, prefacing your comment with the name of that person makes the Comments Section more readable.
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Keeping with the Doc Martin meme, you could say that “throwing out the numbers” helps you from Going Bodmin.
yirgach ==> Quite right. mate. Perspective is a hard thing to achieve — and may require throwing out the numbers.
Kip
I am seriously disappointed. You promised to get rid of all those pesky numbers. However, yet there they were, like gum stuck to the sole of one’s shoe.
Seriously, I think that it would be more accurate to say that what you have done is remove the detail — not being able to see the forest for the trees. In remote sensing, this is sometimes referred to as a synoptic view, or a broad overview. That is, distilling all the detail into a synopsis of the essential information. You accomplished your goal with slide 9 by putting all those pesky numbers into perspective. Your tide interpretation is not unlike the frenetic agitation about the small increase in annual temperatures, which is a fraction of the seasonal changes, or the minute changes claimed for the marine pH, which also is a fraction of the diurnal and seasonal changes, or what happens minute by minute in upwelling zones.
Good show!
Clyde ==> Ah, “throwing out the numbers” might have been an intentional provocation . . . I might have been guilty of manufacturing a “click-bait” title . . . I don’t know — and if I did, I wouldn’t admit it.
The steps in the essay are really what I do when I see studies like the one discussed — only I do it much more rapidly and entirely in my mind. I can tell you, “showing my work” and making all those images and finding all those links and writing all those words (and endlessly editing) takes a great deal more time and effort.
Glad you liked it.
In truth, I think Hogarth et al. did a terrific job up to the point where they formed their final, and unsupportable, conclusion based on a failure to step back and gain perspective — they were fooled by numbers.
Trying to track changes in “mean sea level” over hundreds of years definitely has an extremely low signal-to-noise ratio, where the “noise” is the twice-daily fluctuation between low and high tide, with a secondary monthly cycle of the phases of the moon. The amplitude of the tidal cycle (water elevation difference between high and low tide) tends to be highest during the full moon, slightly lower at the new moon, with minima at the first and last quarter (sun and moon about 90 degrees apart in the sky). The amplitude of the tidal fluctuation is also higher at the equinoxes (gravitational forces from the sun and moon aligned in the same plane) than at the solstices (gravitational force from the sun offset from the plane of the moon’s orbit).
So, anyone trying to track changes in “mean sea level” has to filter out one cycle with a period of about 13 hours, another cycle with a period of about 29 days, and another cycle with a period of about 183 days, all of which have much higher amplitudes than the long-term trend.
Also, for a place such as Port Isaac shown in the photos, what would be of interest to any sailors wanting to enter or leave the harbor is the water depth at the entrance to the harbor–will the bottom of their keels be above the sand or not?
At low tide, with no water in the harbor, that water depth would be recorded as zero–all boats are grounded. But is the “sea level” at low tide actually negative–below the level of the sand at the entrance to the harbor? The person reading the tide gauge at low tide in the 1800’s (or even at present) would probably write down zero, and wouldn’t care how far the water’s edge was from the entrance to the harbor, although that would introduce a bias into the sea level at low tide.
Regarding Steve Case’s comment below:
“But we have governments around the world that have taken that idea as gospel and are acting on it, and that’s the problem.”
Suppose that, for sake of argument, sea levels are increasing at a rate of 2 to 3 mm per year, or about 8 to 12 inches per century. The problem is that “governments around the world” have tried to impose a massively expensive global “solution” that would create poverty everywhere (abandoning the use of fossil fuels) to what is essentially a local problem, limited to land areas at elevations less than a few feet above high tide.
The better, cheaper solution is for LOCAL governments in areas threatened by sea level rise to build sea walls over the next decades to protect themselves against a slowly rising sea level, and allow people living at higher elevations to continue normal life.
Steve Z ==> In support of your idea, look at the photos of Port Isaac. In another 200 years, they have to stop parking cars on the sand at high tide. In 400 years, they’ll have to build a 1 meter sea wall at the bottom of the pub parking lot to keep out sea water off the lot, but only during King Tides.
The global Elite billionaires, for some odd reason, appear to be ignoring alarmist SLR claims again:
https://www.foxnews.com/travel/bahamas-biggest-private-island-auctioned-off
The Bahamian island is supposed to be underwater in 9 years. Yet set to be sold for 10’s of millions. Maybe they know the SLR alarmists claims are a scam? Just a thought. We’ ll have to wait and see if a bidding war breaks out for this private Bahamian Island.
Joel ==> as you probably know by now, I have spent years sailing in the Bahamas and Northern Caribbean. One of my favorite beaches is at Atwood Harbor at the Northeast corner of Crooked Island ( GPS Co-ords — 22.719842292181614, -73.88404845812238 — you can copy and paste directly into Google Maps).
Just outside the rather wide moutn of this little bay, at the northeast corner, is this coral rock outcrop, sticking up:
Back in the ‘ops Jim Hansen warned of rising sea levels. The Major Deagan would be inundated by now. Uh… Nope.
That should read “‘90s”.
have worked on Wall street for 35 years and have a rule I’ve used that may apply …
Just because you think you can measure something doesn’t mean you are able to find anything of value in those measurements …
many companies on Wall street spend huge sums trying to measure best execution … after all who doesn’t want to know if the million shares of stock was purchased at a good price …
Of course, the Portfolio Manager buying the million shares of stock doesn’t really care if it was purchased at $10.25 or $10.27 … he/she thinks the stock is going to $20 in a year … if he/she is right the difference in yield between 10.25 and 10.27 is .38 % … 95.12195% vs 94.74196% return …
(the costs are of course never taken from the Portfolio Managers bonus pool … if it was there would be a lot less spent on this …)
lackawaxen123 ==> Good analogy. I have a friend who had his own seat on the old (no-longer extant) American Stock Exchange, just to trade his own family portfolio. He needed to make about 10% on a trade to make it worthwhile. Ten percent is easier in the more risky low-value stocks, A “penny stock ” (less than a dollar a share) that goes up a dollar had made tremendous gains. IBM (@125.80 today) going up and down a buck, not so impressive.
Sea level rising 1-3mm a year (maybe, if our calculations are right and we haven’t forgotten anything and there are no unknowns and we are really measuring a change in sea level height and…..) is not something to worry about. It might be something to plan for if you own a house on a canal in Miami Beach.
That’s a definition of religion, not science.
Science differs from religion in that it involves confirmation of ideas by measurement.
Duncan MacKenzie ==> That is an extremely limited, limiting and odd idea. Ideas — hypotheses — have to be tested and confirmed but numerical measurement — while very common — is not the only method of valid testing. Experimentation, yes — measurement, not always.
The problems with measurement are well known and well discussed in the philosophies of science. In today’s science, the battle is to know whether your numbers are aiding or impeding understanding.
Darwin developed the hypothesis of “evolution of species over time” by observation. Mendel observed outcomes of cross-breeding of various colored peas.
Vaccines are testing against whether or not the vaccinated later get sick. A vaccine that requires counting successes one by one, and then being judged through complicated statistical analysis, has already failed. It is only iffy medical treatments that need the obvious tested by tedious detailed measurement followed by statistical analysis — “Our new drug improves patient outcomes by 0.1%!” Polio vaccines virtually eliminated polio — smallpox vaccines have eliminated smallpox. Looking back on the battle against polio or smallpox requires no numbers at all — its success, which is existing knowledge, is obvious to all.
The example in this essay should be instructive to those over-dependent on their digital calculation machines — massaging the numbers may create a mathematically correct answer which is not physically correct or societally important.
Kip
“…computers and their associated software, calculation and statistical analysis are far too easy and seem to have replaced both logic and critical thinking, even basic reasoning.”
This is a huge statement that speaks proverbial volumes. The larger implication is that making things easier has opened the door or perhaps floodgate to people, not particularly thinkers at all, into science, most notably politically agenda-ized science. The ‘science’ is used in the corrupted sociological science way as a hammer to change direction and exert control
on society.
Steve McIntyre’s famous assessment of the ‘mainstream’ climate scientists comes to mind (they’d be lucky in an earlier generation to become high school science teachers). Or Phil Jones admission in climategate that he never learned to use Excel!
Gary ==> If you want to prove to yourself the principles outlined in my essay above, volunteer as a Judge at your local or regional High School Science Fair. serving as a Judge is a good thing in its own right, but you will be astonished at the basic critical thinking, logic, and reasoning skills exhibited there — not just the students, but their advisors (science teachers) as well.
I did this years ago in Florida and wrote about in it here.
The students were being taught that ONLY the numbers were important — and that having numbers meant that a lot of analysis was required to get a good score. Utter nonsense and it produced a lot of nonsensical results.. Kids were running ANOVA and desperately trying to get P-values that would validate their — sometimes absolutely nutty — hypotheses. They were measuring the growth rate of seedlings to the mm, weights to ridiculously small units, and then puching it all into analyses-by-program-button (“Click here to get your ANOVA value…”).
The best example was a kid that “exposed growing seedlings to radio waves” by placing some of them next to a portable FM radio playing NPR. Did a lot of careful measurements too and got a result. I had to go to his science teacher and point out that a radio receiver does not emit radio waves….
Gary ==> I often quote Steve Mosher’s lovely famous statement defending Global Average Surface Temperature (GAST):
“The global temperature exists. It has a precise physical meaning. It’s this meaning that allows us to say… The LIA was cooler than today…it’s the meaning that allows us to say the day side of the planet is warmer than the night side…The same meaning that allows us to say Pluto is cooler than earth and mercury is warmer.”
He’s got that absolutely right — we can say those things. We don’t, however, need all those GAST data bases to tell us that — we can just look and hypothesize (in the case of Pluto — poor Pluto.
Kip,
He got at least one wrong. The GAST does *not* allow us to say the day side of the planet is warmer than the night side. If we had a Dayside Global Average Surface Temp *and* a Nightside Global Average Surface Temperature then we might possibly be able to say the day side is warmer than the night side. But that would *also* mean everyone could see that it is the night side temperatures (usually when Tmin occurs) that are going up and not the day side temperatures (usually when Tmax occurs). Of course this would shoot down their entire CAGW religion and dry up most of their research money. So you’ll never see them convert to doing this. You won’t see the models converted to showing daytime/nighttime average temps either.
And I also disagree that the GAST has a precise physical meaning. If you can’t go someplace and measure it then it doesn’t have a precise meaning. It is a calculated result with all kinds of questionable calculations being used – which means there is no precise physical meaning.
And of course you are correct. We don’t need the homogenized, interpolated, infilled, and altered databases to know any of this!
Tim ==> Well, yeah, but considering the source, it is a brave and brash admission as to the true, very limited, utility of GAST.
When something is presented in an engineering textbook, it is usually explained by a neat set of equations.
An example would be Amplitude Modulation. It is presented as the multiplication of two sine waves. I have to tell you that was the last thing on Reginald Fessenden‘s mind when he invented it.
Usually some kind of conceptualization comes first and the math comes afterward.
commie ==> Yes, in real discovery science, the idea proceeds the hypothesis, which proceeds the experimentation — which often but not always includes some measurements of some kind — not always precision measurements. Rough counts, back of the envelope and mental quick calculations often suffice.
Commie: it is interesting that Fessenden didn’t receive due acknowledgement of the real invention of the radio as we know it. I believe he even had the idea stolen from him. I was taught about Marconi and the telegraph that followed it but no mention of Fessenden.
I got my degrees in geology and engineering 60yrs ago. Canadians, it seems, don’t buck the chauvinism of European science, nor the aggressiveness of the American scientific enterprise. I recently corrected a former Israeli concerning the discovery of insulin and a few other things. Polite to a fault I guess.
It is just as likely as not that successful inventors will be ripped off and end their lives in anonymity. Armstrong would be the poster child for that.
Don Lancaster has cogent advice for independent inventors, the main point being to avoid patents at all costs.
I would say that the majority of people who made our modern world possible are anonymous to all but a few specialists. For instance, how many people understand the scope of Oliver Heaviside‘s contributions to physics and engineering?
“Lies, damnable lies and statistics.” – Been true for over a hundred years.
“Science – the effort to understand the physical world around us – must start with ideas – not numbers.”
I wholeheartedly agree with this statement. And I recommend, as I have in past comments, a quite amazing book on the history of temperature…and I omit the word “measurement,” because measurement is quite a way down on the hierarchy of concepts related to temperature. The book is by Hasok Chang, and is titled “Inventing Temperature.” Anyone who thinks that temperature is a simple, fundamental, easily “measured” quantity needs to read this book.
It isn’t an easy read, though mostly because the author puts about half of its contents in footnotes (unnecessarily, IMHO). But it is a rewarding read, philosophically.
My education was in Mechanical Engineering (BSME and MSME from Purdue University), which I sought specifically in order to pursue a career in space transportation – i.e. “rocket science.” In addition to the regular thermodynamics courses, I took courses in statistical thermodynamics and in laser theory (another side passion). And although I learned a great deal in these, none ever addressed the fundamental philosophical underpinnings of the concept of temperature. If you think sea level is not conceptually grounded (and it isn’t), you should investigate temperature. To think that we can say with a straight face that we can calculate temperature “anomalies” of 0.01 C is pure BS.
Michael ==> Thanks for stopping by and for the book recommendation. I read a review of the book and am intrigued. Hoping to find a free, or at least reasonably priced, eBook version.
I do think that “Global Sea Level” is at least a poorly conceived and possibly entirely non-physical concept (in its currently usages).
And I could not agree with you more about “To think that we can say with a straight face that we can calculate temperature “anomalies” of 0.01 C is pure BS.”
Epilogue:
Gaining proper perspective is hard and even harder when presented with a lot of numbers that seem “oh so truthy” — “look precise therefore must be true”. Those pesky numbers can fool us into believing things that are contrary to reason, contrary to real-world experience and contrary to what own own critical thinking would arrive at from the same data. This has been described as Truthiness. Rosling wrote a whole book to dispel Truthiness and replace it with Factfulness. In his book by that title, he trried to dispel commonly believed mis-perceptions about the world based on reports which were themselves based on such collections of poorly-collected, out-of-perspective numbers — data sets — that have caused widespread belief in not-true ideas.
In our present case, UK Mean Sea Level, the interesting finding of the Hogarth et al. paper is that their calculation of Mean Sea Level Rise around the UK is perfectly in line with the low end of the normally accepted figure for world-wide sea level rise. They find 400 mm over 200 years — or 16 inches — which is the low end of the more usual “8-12 inches per century”. Quoting NOAA: “the absolute global sea level rise is believed to be 1.7 +/- 0.3 millimeters/year.during the 20th century.” Their finding, quantitatively, is perfectly in line with the NOAA statement. That would have been my headline for the paper.
If I were to review the paper from a “numbers” viewpoint, I would find major fault with the Red Trend Line superimposed on their final graph. Looking at the graph with the Red Trend Line removed, it is easy to see that the long term trend runs all the way back to 1820 in one continuous even slope, with a bit of a pause in rise — a little level spot — around the mid-19th century. The Red Trend Line is stated to have been produced by (over-reliance) on an “optimum piecewise linear trend fit (three stick model)”. This over-computation leads them to ignore the overall apparent-to-the-naked-eye trend that is even across the entire graph. See the graph in the slide show with the red line removed.
We have unfortunately been subjected to seeming endless senseless comments from two Trolls who like Europe’s Footbal Holligans have not come to see the game but only for the fight afterwards. I do wish readers would follow the long-term admonition “Please Do Not Feed The Trolls”. Simply ignore them, they have nothing substantive to say — they are “just here for the fight”. When ignored, they slink back under the bridge.
If you have further questions that I have not answered or something you just have to say on the topic, you can always email me at my first name at the domain i4.net.
Thanks for reading.
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I lived in Thurso and worked in Wick many years ago. I can tell you from personal observation that the difference between high and low tides in the far north of Scotland are very dramatic.
Dragineez ==> Thanks for the local eye-witness perspective!
Measurement merely supports hypothetico-deductive reasoning.
“all science is based on measurement”
All measures have error.
Therefore, all science is in error.